Oyell's Weblog

Your message wasn’t delivered because of security policies

oyell — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:43:42 +0000

Had a problem with a new Distribution group in Exchange 2007.

From the Management Console go to Recipient Configuration, Distribution Group

Select the group that is giving you problems and go its properties. Select the Mail Flow Settings Tab and double click on the “Message Delivery Restrictions” Uncheck “require that all senders are authenticated”

Metadata for patch missing

oyell — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 09:21:12 +0000

This problem occured for me first time at a customers VMWare Farm, where they had setup several servers in VMotion, and Virtual Center.

This is actualy an easy problem to solve, as it is a configuration on the Virtual Center that has been changed. Instead of using default port on Virtual Center, wich is port 80, it was in this case port 88.

Change port on each VMWare servers wich you are using on Virtual Center, and restart UpdateManager service .

command on shell to change port on each vmware is : (change port respectively to whatever your Virtual Center use)

esxcfg-firewall –openport 88,tcp,out,updatemanager

Root access ESX

oyell — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 07:17:23 +0000

As a routine when setting up new ESX Servers, I always open the access for root users to logg on by shell.

Follow this to give root access to logon by ssh / shell on your ESX Server :

type : nano –w /etc/ssh/sshd_config
change line : PermitRootLogin no
to : PermitRoot Login yes
type : service sshd restart

Restoring Mailbox Items

oyell — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 06:50:57 +0000

When restoring items from an mailbox, you have to do some work in advance to make it work. It`s not enough with only backup of information store to restore these items, even if you can see them correctly on backup, and select for example contacts.

First of all, you need to install an extra “addon” on the exchange server itself. This addon is released by Microsoft, and it`s called Microsoft Exchange Server MAPI Client and Collaboration Data Objects.

Second, when Backup needs to restore an individual message from tape it needs to restore the complete copy of the information store to this temp location. If your c:\ drive doesn`t have enough space free, you need to add another temp drive to use for this restore.

ToDo :

Install Microsoft Exchange Server MAPI Client and Collaboration Data Objects. You can download this files from here
Choose what items to restore, either individual message/contact items, or complete mailbox
Select a drive to use as temporary drive that has enough space located. If your information store (not user mailbox) is 20gb, then you need a temporary place that has atleast 20gb of free space.
Start the restore, and good luck

SQL Excel Freeware Add-In

oyell — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 07:11:27 +0000

SQL Excel has created a nifty addon that can easy pull out data from SQL Server to your Excel Worksheet.

You can even import data from MYSQL, Oracle, Sybase, MS Access, and more. It`s also a freeware software, and easy to use.

More information and download, go to http://www.sqlexcel.net/

VMWare Client Opening Console Attempt Fails

oyell — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 08:34:02 +0000

A college of me was out on one of our customer rigg, and found out he had added the harddrives into wrong server, after he had installed VMWare Esx and setup clients.

He then switched harddrivers from one server to the other. Only difference between them was the CPU. First original box had 2x dual core xeon cpu`s, while the new one have 2xquad core cpu`s.

Anyhow, after changing harddriver the esx bootet, and he could load all virtual machines on it, but there was one problem accuring, and that was

“error connecting: can not connect to host x.x.x.x: a connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.”

We could not connect to the server console by VI client, and after searching the web we found this solution, wich worked very well without any reboots.

You need to login to ssh by i.e. putty, and edit the following line : /etc/vmware/config (type #nano /etc/vmware/config)

Add this following line : vmauthd.server.alwaysProxy = “TRUE” at the end of the file. Press ctrl+x and answer yes to save it.

Now everything should work out pretty well

SQL Server 2005 Monitoring Memory

oyell — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 05:31:58 +0000

It`s very important to be montinoring your memory, and understand what every memory event logg means on a SQL server.

Here is a list over the most used and important Memory Manager Counters :

SQL Server Memory Manager counters

Description

Connection Memory (KB)

Total amount of dynamic memory the server is using for maintaining connections.

Granted Workspace Memory (KB)

Total amount of memory currently granted to executing processes such as hash, sort, bulk copy, and index creation operations.

Lock Blocks

Current number of lock blocks in use on the server (refreshed periodically). A lock block represents an individual locked resource, such as a table, page, or row.

Lock Blocks Allocated

Current number of allocated lock blocks. At server startup, the number of allocated lock blocks plus the number of allocated lock owner blocks depends on the SQL Server Locks configuration option. If more lock blocks are needed, the value increases.

Lock Memory (KB)

Total amount of dynamic memory the server is using for locks.

Lock Owner Blocks

Number of lock owner blocks currently in use on the server (refreshed periodically). A lock owner block represents the ownership of a lock on an object by an individual thread. Therefore, if three threads each have a shared (S) lock on a page, there will be three lock owner blocks.

Lock Owner Blocks Allocated

Current number of allocated lock owner blocks. At server startup, the number of allocated lock owner blocks and the number of allocated lock blocks depend on the SQL Server Locks configuration option. If more lock owner blocks are needed, the value increases dynamically.

Maximum Workspace Memory (KB)

Maximum amount of memory available for executing processes such as hash, sort, bulk copy, and index creation operations.

Memory Grants Outstanding

Total number of processes that have successfully acquired a workspace memory grant.

Memory Grants Pending

Total number of processes waiting for a workspace memory grant.

Optimizer Memory (KB)

Total amount of dynamic memory the server is using for query optimization.

SQL Cache Memory (KB)

Total amount of dynamic memory the server is using for the dynamic SQL cache.

Target Server Memory (KB)

Total amount of dynamic memory the server can consume.

Total Server Memory (KB)

The committed memory from the buffer pool (in kilobytes).

Note:

This is not the total memory used by SQL Server.

Exchange 2007 Users Mailbox Size

oyell — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:36:07 +0000

Exchange Management Shell is your friend here. You can here execute many different commands to get your work done.

As title says, we focuse on user mailbox size.

One command is (but not that great if many users) : get-mailboxstatistics

Honestly, I dont find this command any better : get-mailboxstatistics | fl displayname,totalitemsize

So, my quest is..find a way to either create a script that puts out everything in a htm page, or a better command to show only users on defined storage group.